


Haint

by Cunien



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Buddyfic, Gen, Haunting, PTSD, Post-War, Supernatural Elements, Wartime, ghost - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 07:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cunien/pseuds/Cunien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Slowly and with great care, Roe goes about the business of severing the thin ties that had begun to bind him to Heffron. Day by day he transfers a little more of his dependency on to Renee - and it’s easy this time, it hurts less than with Babe. Roe realises, with a spreading warmth of shock and relief, that the worst has already happened: Renee is dead. He will never answer the scream for a medic and find her there, bleeding, begging, crying for her mother. It is nothing like the armed grenade that was his tentative friendship with Babe. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>He has already lost her, and now there is nothing left to be afraid of.</i>
</p><p>**<br/>Renee stays with Roe after her death, and after the war, and every day he spends with her he becomes a little less alive. </p><p>(Note: Although Babe is absent until the end, he is a fairly huge and important factor in the entire story.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haint

The blue fabric tears with a brittle sound, and Roe feels something small and vital rip inside him. The violence of the gesture, the sound that cracks into the snowy silence sends a bright flag of shameful satisfaction unfurling inside him, and he pushes down the hot desire that rises like bile in his throat to scream, or cry, or break something utterly.

Roe stuffs the other half of the headscarf unceremoniously into his jacket pocket, and takes Babe’s hand. He’s surprised by how steady his own is, and how much Babe’s shakes in his cradled grasp. The other man’s skin is pallid against the vivid blue of the headscarf. Roe wraps the fabric tight around the puckered edges of the deep cut across his palm.

“You doin’ okay, Gene?” Babe asks, the ever-present shiver and the lingering cough giving his voice a thin and reedy quality. He sounds young - God he sounds so fucking young.

Roe nods once, tight. “Doin’ fine.”

“‘Cause you’re still holding my hand, Doc.” 

Roe lets go and shuffles awkwardly in the foxhole, but Babe just huffs out a laugh and fixes his gaze out towards the line.

 

*

It’s a few days later that Roe first sees her, and he’s so tired that the slight, wavering impression doesn’t even warrant any surprise. It’s the kind of bone-deep weariness that makes him feel -when he can feel with any kind of coherency- like an echo of a real-life human being, and will only be staved off for so long before it descends like a lead weight on his limbs, his lungs, his heart. She flickers somewhere in the space between the trees and the falling snow and coalesces for maybe half a second, unmistakably Renee. 

But his heart keeps pumping its steady rhythm: there’s no start or shock of surprise to see her standing six feet from his hunched form in a foxhole near Foy when he looked into her glassy eyes, in a bombed-out church doorway in Bastogne not four days ago, a halo of blood spread wide about her.

Roe scrubs a heavy hand through his hair, blinks hard, and settles further into the foxhole. Babe is a still, solid presence next to him, wheezing slightly in his slumber, and Roe gives in to the sleep that buzzes like morphine through his veins.

*

The next day Roe has written off his seeing Renee as a hallucination, a product of grief and exhaustion accumulating day after day like a snow drift banked against his insides. But trudging through the forest on his way back from the aid station he can’t shake the feeling that he is not alone. He stops, and catches a flicker of movement behind a tree.

“Babe?” he calls, quietly, ever aware that the white blank spaces of the forest could hold a German soldier, wandering far from his line but armed, frightened. He pulls his bag a little closer and then lets it go, feeling ridiculous. Morphine, bandages, a pair of scissors: what good will they do against a luger or a rifle? He takes a careful step towards the trees, though when he looks closer it’s clear there’s no one there.

But all day the feeling persists, and begins to take its toll on Roe’s nerves. He's only just begun to reconcile himself with the prospect of company in the form of Babe Heffron, or the occasional whirlwind of Ralph Spina blustering by on his constant way to somewhere or other - but solitude and silence are things that he had grown accustomed to over the two years he's spent with Easy. This feeling of eyes on him, constantly, begins to prickle and itch at the back of his consciousness until at last he snaps, and whirls around to challenge it, whatever it is.

Throwing his bag to the snow with a spat out curse he spins around, arms spread wide.

"Had about enough of this!" Roe yells into the snowy emptiness. He is shocked to feel the prickle of tears in the corner of his eyes, but blinks them away before they can amount to much - he hasn't cried since he was a child, many years ago. "I _ain't_ goin' fucking crazy," he says, though if this is addressed to his silent shadow or his own self Roe is not entirely sure. He only knows that he hasn't come this far to be shipped back home to a nut-house, to abandon his men and his job because of his tenuous grip on reality. 

"So if somebody's there you better quit playing and show your goddamn face or just get it over with and shoot me already...," he trails off, "... _Please._ "

There’s a flicker of something behind a tall thin pine tree, scarred and ribboned with shellburst. He leans, cautiously, to peer around it. 

Renee stands there, looking oddly rather sheepish. Roe blinks, hard, hoping to clear his vision of whatever fleck of snow or speck of dirt that has resulted in her appearance before him. But when he opens his eyes again she is still there, and he feels absurdly relieved. The sight of her sends a hot rush of blood to his heart, sets it beating double-quick. He notices, with an odd sort of detachment, that he can see the forest beyond her, that the fitful snowfall is drifting _through_ her. She closes her eyes and as if by sheer will becomes a little more tangible in front of him.

“You been followin’ me,” Roe says, when he can find his voice once more around a tongue that suddenly seems thick and heavy. Renee nods.

“It really you?”

She appears to consider his question for a moment, and shrugs. She looks just as she had when he last saw her lying in that church doorway: her eyes are a little flat and glassy, death has rendered her already pale skin the waxy colour of off-milk, pallid against the dark smudge of blood, glistening a little wetly against her temple and down the right side of her face. But she is standing here. Looking at him.

“Thought I was going crazy,” Roe says, taking off his helmet and scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Maybe you are,” Renee says, and her voice sounds like it’s coming from a next-door room, a little muffled.

“Maybe,” Roe agrees. “Why you been hidin’ from me?”

“I didn’t want to frighten you,” she replies.

He smiles.

“I ain’t afraid.”

And he really isn’t any more.

*

Sometimes Renee is with him and sometimes she is not, though there seems to be little logic to her appearances: late at night when he settles into a fitful sleep, in the aftershock of battle as his muscles tic and spasm and he tries to wipe the blood from his hands. Even sometimes when he sprints towards a writhing mass of limbs and khaki and pain, he will catch a glimpse of sunlight on the burnished gold of her hair from the corner of his eye, and feel her nearby. 

Sometimes Roe wonders if she is with someone else when he can’t see her, and there is a quiver of jealousy deep in his belly. But when he asks her about family she says _not anymore_ with such finality he hasn’t the heart to ask any of the questions that push insistently behind his teeth. He suspects that when he can’t see her she is simply nowhere and nothing, a thought that leaves his insides cold right through.

No one else seems to notice her presence, though she’ll often be beside Roe as he sits outside a group of men sharing the warmth of company and a shared smoke. He listens to their jokes and gossip, shoves his hands deep in his pockets and leans back, slightly, until he can almost feel the solidity of Renee behind him, his head pillowed on the soft curve of her abdomen.

She never frightens him in herself - she is Renee and she is his. She would never hurt him. But after a while Roe starts to notice something more disquieting than her appearing to him long after her death: when she is happy, or sad, or feels anything in any great degree, the blood begins to bloom, slowly, like a bruise against the pale skin of her temple. The wounds Renee died of appear one by one, though she does not seem to feel or even notice them particularly, and he feels it would be churlish somehow to draw her attention to them.

He begins to notice too that she stays away whenever he is with Babe. He doesn’t spend long dwelling on it, it’s not a decision that he finds particularly difficult: it is easy to use his yearning for Renee, his lingering guilt at her death as an excuse to pull away from Babe. It’s a relief. 

Slowly and with great care, Roe goes about the business of severing the thin ties that had begun to bind him to the other man. He’s not cruel: he would never want to hurt anyone, much less Babe Heffron, who he has begun to feel an affection and strange kinship for, though it makes him uneasy to admit. But the early flourishing of their friendship is something Roe tells himself he has allowed to grow beyond what is sensible, and pruning it back to a casual acquaintance is what’s best for both of them.

He’s not too blind to notice the look of hurt in Babe Heffron’s eyes, every now and then, but he must do what’s best for both of them. Letting him go is what’s best for both of them.

When Sergeant Guarnere is hit and packed away to the aid station Roe feels a twinge of shame at his quiet, careful dismissal of Babe. He remembers that Bill and Babe were close, but comforts himself with the renewed efforts the remaining men of the company make to bundle Heffron up in their easy jokes and shared gripes. Babe has friends about him, he has no need of Roe.

Day by day he transfers a little more of his dependency on to Renee - and it’s easy this time, it hurts less than with Babe. Roe realises, with a spreading warmth of shock and relief, that the worst has already happened: Renee is dead. He will never answer the scream for a medic and find her there, bleeding, begging, crying for her mother. It is nothing like the armed grenade that was his tentative friendship with Babe. 

He has already lost her, and now there is nothing left to be afraid of.

*

The rumour goes around that they’ll be leaving Rachamps in the morning, bound for somewhere called Haguenau which Renee thinks is in France, near the German border. Roe sits, back against the broad cold stones of the church, feeling their chill through his jacket. A few fitful flakes of snow drift petulantly down from the night sky that hangs low and heavy over the town. 

“Try it now,” Renee says, beside him. 

Roe shifts, and carefully, by degrees, takes hold of her hand.

They both laugh a little, and his fingers close about hers. There’s something slightly transparent about her skin beneath his, but he can feel it, and this is the first time that his touch has not drifted through the paper-pale smudge of her hand.

“How d’you do it?” Roe asks, and Renee shrugs with a quirk of a smile, “How do you know it’s not you that’s doing it?”

He sits, feeling the coldness of her skin seep slowly up his arm, and regards their linked hands. 

“Think this is goodbye?”

“Maybe,” she replies after a while.

Roe nods tightly, holding his breath, and looks up at the snow spiraling down. He’s supposed all along that Renee would not be able to leave with him when they eventually moved out of Belgium. He takes a moment to still his heart that’s beating too loud, too wildly, and offers her a smile that he hopes might convey some small echo of the tumult of gratitude and grief and need inside his head, inside his heart.

*

When Jackson dies Roe lets his eyes meet Babe’s, and feels the chasm between them widening, dug deep by the slow attrition of hope against the onslaught of blood and exhaustion.

When he’s helped take Jackson to the grave registration unit he walks out into the street to see Renee, standing in the blackened timber door-frame of a house across the street. He wipes his hands on his jacket, nervous somehow, and tries to still the wild leap of happiness that pushes up his throat and eases the muscles of his face into the unfamiliar action of a smile.

She smiles back at him as he crosses over to her, but he can see there’s something hollow about it. 

“Been here long?”

“A little while.” She glances nervously at the old municipal hall the graves registration unit has taken as its home whilst in Haguenau, and a shadow flits across her eyes. “I didn’t want to go. In there.”

“Yeah,” Roe says, scuffing the snow with the toe of his boot. “Yeah it ain’t a nice place.”

They don’t talk about why she’s still here, in France. He’d supposed somehow that she would be tied to her home in the Ardennes, the church that she’d died in, the neighbouring towns she’d visited over the years. They don’t talk about why she’s still with him, or how much longer she’ll stay and especially - especially - not of what awaits her when she leaves.

* 

Renee is already there when they arrive at Landsberg. Roe sees her, cut into sections by the chain-link fence as she wanders amongst the smoke and ashes. The blood is stained thick and brown on her head, matted in her hair.

Her eyes are wide and filled with a terrible quiet sadness, but no trace of shock. It is as though her own end has gifted her all the knowledge of death and life, and the terrible possibilities of humanity. Roe sees her reach out a hand to help steady a man who stumbles in his limping twisted steps towards his liberators. The man falls through her intangible grasp and the grief flicks quicksilver-fast across her face, as though she’d forgotten, for a moment, that she is beyond the ability to help him. Roe thinks about her confession that she could not bare to treat another wounded man, and as another splinter shears away like a calving iceberg he feels, with some surprise, that his heart is still capable of breaking.

*

Soon after, the combination of exhaustion and the long hours spent at the camp with disease raging amongst its internees hits Roe like the prop-blast from a jump, and the sickness settles heavy and buzzing in his body. He shivers through a day in the back of a truck as they move out - wedged between men who take turns in bribing and cajoling him to drink, to eat a little, to answer when they ask _you still with us, Doc?_ \- before being poked and prodded and hefted into a bed in a house commandeered from some shocked German family.

He thinks perhaps that Babe was near him in all this - feels him tickle at the corner of his mind - but he doesn’t have the energy to hope anymore.

Sometime during the night, beset as Roe is with fever and the terrible burden of horror and despair like a tight lump behind his breastbone, he feels the bed dip ever so slightly, and the cold stillness of Renee’s body stretched out beside his. There’s a ghost of her hand against his burning forehead, and he opens his eyes to see her face before him, shrouded in blood. There are tears on her cheeks, pearly and flickering. Her lips graze his, tentatively. He leans slightly towards her and feels the coldness of her race through him as they kiss, her tongue like a sliver of ice between his lips.

*

They say goodbye whenever they’re given warning that Easy will move out. Roe will find some private place to be away from the men, and doesn’t care that it’s easy, that there’s no one wondering where he is. Behind an aid station, a quiet corridor of a town hall, the damp basement of a commandeered house still ringing with the shouts and cigarette smoke of the men who’d lived in it for the past week - all these places are witness to Roe and Renee’s tentative, tip-toeing farewells. He will take her hand, they will kiss. Once he gives in and lets the rush of despair and desire push her up against a wall, feels the sharp ghost of her hipbones against him, the feathery echo of her hair through his fingers.

Sometimes the company is given the order to move and Roe will only have time to catch a glimpse of her standing beside the road as the trucks sweep past, and feels a pain, sharp and jagged in his heart. It doesn’t matter that each goodbye so far has been followed by the breathless rush of relief when they are reunited - each time he’s sure it will be the last, that he will leave Renee behind in some German town he can’t even remember the name of and she’ll be lost, forever this time.

And then: VE Day. A little later, Japan quits too. They are sure, this time, that this is the end.

Renee leans her head against his shoulder as they sit outside, letting the warm night air wash over them. Roe is a little drunk, having given in to the cajoling of the men and downed half a bottle of strong sugary alcohol of indeterminate origin, reasoning that if he got it all over with in one go they’d leave him alone. The men soon moved on to dancing, running down the hotel corridors, midnight swims, and Roe is content to let them scream and holler and laugh themselves to a satisfied exhaustion sometime in the small hours of the morning.

So he sits, with Renee, who is the only person he really wanted to spend the night with anyway. 

He wants to cry, but doesn’t think he can. The corners of his eyes burn and crackle as though they’re all iced up, but nothing comes.

“It’s alright,” Renee says after a while, “You’re going home.”

Roe opens his mouth, closes it, can’t think of a single word that will stretch and hold and carry all the things he’s feeling inside.

“It’s alright,” she says again, and her words are like a breath of wind. “We mustn’t be afraid.”

The night is too warm and too close, too much of everything, and he is alone. He shudders in a breath around the terrible burning inside him, tries to quell the steady rising of the tide of panic within.

*

The troop-ship, the trains, the buses: the whole blurred process of demobilization is confusing and exhausting to Roe. He sleeps fitfully, imagining a smudged line following the route he’s taken, leaving little bits of himself along the way, and wonders what will be left of him when he finally reaches Bayou Chene.

The men leave, alone or in groups, heading off to their respective homes spread wide across the country. Roe marvels that they ever had anything to talk about: this one from Harvard and this one from a backwoods cabin, this one a college student and that one a labourer. The only thing they ever had in common was the Airborne, and the shared slog of trauma that they’ll never speak of, not even to each other. 

Roe catches a glimpse of red hair once, in the crowd, and looks down until almost everyone has moved away. He feels hollowed out like a halloween pumpkin, a stupid cut-out mask for his face. He wants to go home, he wants to run away, he wants Renee, he wants Babe, he has no goddamn clue what he wants. All he has are orders - and his orders are to go home.

When the train pulls up at the tiny platform, Roe’s expected arrival time has already changed so often they’d agreed that his mother would just wait for him at home. No one else gets off, and the train pulls away, leaving him curiously blank. Everything looks exactly the same as the day he left.

“I’ve never been to America before,” Renee says, looking about her.

Roe laughs, a tight little huff of air, and feels like the luckiest goddamn man on the planet. “Never brought a girl home to meet my family, either,” Roe says.

She smiles, a little crooked. “Do you think they’ll like me?”

“Sure they will,” Roe says, picking up his barracks bag and heading down the steps from the platform to the dusty street, feeling her following behind.

“Even your mother?” Renee teases. “She will say I’m too pale, too _triste._ ”

“She’ll say you’re pretty,” Roe says, feeling, absurdly, the flush creep a little up onto his cheekbones, “But too skinny, try to feed you up, ply you with gumbo.”

“Gumbo?” Renee says, “Oh yes, that is my favourite.”

*

In his old bedroom it takes Roe hours to fall asleep. He feels too big somehow, like he's trying to fit himself into a pair of shoes three sizes too small. Lying awake, he is overcome with need for Renee, filling him entirely like smoke in his lungs. He begins to realise that when she's not there he feels her loss like a gaping wound. He calls her name, once, in a whisper that he is terrified his mother might hear in her bedroom across the hall. He tries to convince himself for some time that the white shape of the curtain by the window is Renee standing there, but he can always feel her when she is with him, even when he cannot see her. He is alone. Finally the exhaustion overtakes him and he drifts into fitful sleep, awoken only in the small hours of the morning by a quiet, broken noise outside

The moon is huge and pallid, a faint ring circling it in the night sky.

Renee sits crying on the porch, back against the wall and knees drawn up. "Why am I still here?" she asks. Roe sits down beside her and tries to hold her hand, but for some reason she is less tangible tonight, and his fingers simply brush through a slightly cooler patch of warm Louisiana night air. The wound on her head gapes, dark and sickening and angry, the blood like an ink black splash in the moonlight.

"I thought...I thought perhaps...I was supposed to help you home. But now you're here," she waves a hand at the hot night, full to bursting with croaking frogs and singing cicadas, the faint, brackish smell of bayou, the cloying sweetness of jasmine. "You made it."

Something like envy and grief and tight hot despair settles like a heavy stone in Roe's stomach. Renee wants to leave him, but he cannot quite fathom life without her now. 

"Why am I still here?" She asks again, her eyes pleading.

"I don't know," Roe says. "I'm sorry."

But he's not sorry - not sorry at all.

*

The next morning she is waiting outside, under the big oak tree near the road. “Going for a walk, Ma,” Roe calls as he lopes down the creaking porch steps, idly registering that he will need to repaint the house soon, clear the ramble of morning glory that’s beginning to smother it once more.

Renee laughs as he approaches, all trace of the night before packed away now. “What’s so funny?” he asks.

“Nothing,” she says, smoothing the collar of his shirt. “I’ve only ever seen you in uniform. You look...good.”

He smiles, feeling the flush of happiness in the pit of his stomach.

“So what are we doing today?” she asks.

“What do you want to do? You’re the guest.”

“I want to you to show me everything,” Renee smiles, taking his hand. It feels like the echo of cool water in his palm. 

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

Roe shows her the fields of his childhood, the trees he’d climbed, the ones he’d fallen out of. He points out the Cajun names his Grandmere used to call the plants and animals - _des meurres_ and _chadron_ and _pop chocks_ \- and the creeks he’d swam or fished on long summer days.

“It’s not like Bastogne at all,” she says, the sadness just fraying the edges of her words. They lean against the warm splintered wood of a bridge, watching the creek pass endlessly beneath them.

“No, it ain’t,” Roe says. “You feel it? The sun?” he asks, after a while. He closes his eyes a moment, buoyant in the humid air of home.

Renee shakes her head. “No. But I remember how it felt.”

“Thought I’d forgotten it,” Roe says, “Thought I’d never feel it again.” He feels a rush of sadness like icy water, for her, for all the men who died in the snow and the blood beneath his hands. Suddenly he is undeserving of the warm day and the pleasure of comfort and home. _This isn’t right_ , he thinks, _I shouldn’t be here_. There’s something scratchy and hard in Roe’s throat - he coughs and looks away, overcome with the need to hide his face from her.

Renee takes his hand. They walk to a field where he used to play as a child, and lie down together in the tickling tall grass of late summer, her cold hands and cold lips shivering him into sated exhaustion.

On their way home Roe takes her near the bayou, the path running close to the green sluggish water. He feels Renee stop, and turns to see her staring intently at a spot in the water that burbles and parts over the broad black shape of an alligator rising to the surface. As he watches, another and another rise from the depths, emerging like u-boats. They come, all sizes, floating in the waters or dragging themselves on fat reptilian legs onto the banks and silty inlets, quiet and sullen and ancient.

“Renee,” Roe calls, feeling the hairs on the nape of his neck prickle. “Come away.”

She stands, silent, staring at them. He's never seen so many gators at once, and though he's never been scared of them before the sight strikes somewhere deep and primitive now. “Renee,” he says again. She turns and blinks at him, the light taking a moment to ease back into her eyes, and smiles, like paper pasted over a crack in a wall. He takes her hand and turns back along the path with shaking, uneasy steps.

*

The second night at home marks the first of many that Roe wakes with a bitten-off scream, slick with sweat and panic, and for the first few times at least it’s some minutes before he’s aware enough to realise he has vomited over himself.

He can’t say exactly what the dreams are about: they are born more of colour and sound and smell than reality, a patchwork of sense and memory that adds up to terror, real and burning through every pore in his body. The slick wetness of blood beneath his hands and the smell of burnt flesh and exposed intestines makes his stomach heave again just to think of it.

Renee cradles his head in her arms and croons softly, cool fingers carding through his sweat-soaked hair. He vaguely recognises the words of the French lullaby, but his thoughts are lulled by the faint smell that comes from Renee: cold air, snow and pine sap. Bastogne.

*

“There’s a dance tonight in town,” his mother says one morning, loading his plate with buttermilk biscuits and bacon, the worry tucked expertly away in the lines around her mouth, “Lots of the boys come home gonna be there,” she says, “Ruby be pleased to see you, I bet. You should go.”

“Don’t think so, Maman,” Roe says. He stuffs the bacon in the biscuits, gathers them all up and kisses his mother on the cheek before heading for the door. “Be back later,” he calls, not seeing the way she turns back to the pan on the stove, blinking hard.

*

He's been home two weeks - his days spent wandering with Renee and making excuses to his mother as to why he's not looking for work - when Josef Carry at the garage in town asks if Roe will help out a couple of days a week, and he can think of no legitimate excuse for turning the job down. 

Josef and he have never been on more than nodding terms, but since returning from the war Roe feels a new coolness in the other man's voice when he speaks to him. Josef has flat feet, he tells Roe, with a regularity that suggests he wasn't exactly devastated with his 4F stamp. Regardless, he seems to find plenty of reasons not to be at the garage each day, and Roe is more than happy to be left alone, either with the chatter of the radio or Renee's steady presence beside him.

It’s a mile and a half into town to the garage, which Roe walks most mornings with Renee beside him, her feet never disturbing the light dusty surface of the road. Half way along they pass the crumbling Labranche house, which is half decayed and boarded up but still inhabited by old Benny Labranche and a pack of bristling, mottled dogs. They set off a racket whenever anyone passes, throwing themselves at the high chain-link fence, but Renee’s presence always sends them scuttling back under the house, whimpering. 

Roe thinks at first she hasn’t noticed, but he catches her looking at them with a tight frown, and he takes her hand in what he hopes is a gesture of comfort.

"You're good at fixing things," she says one day as he tinkers with an engine on an old pickup brought in by a neighbour. 

"Guess so," he says, engrossed in his work. Then, as the thought strikes him and he puts down the wrench he'd been using, "A lot simpler with machines."

"Less blood," Renee agrees.

"Less dying. This engine can't be fixed it'll be taken apart, used for something else, just keep on going."

There is a silence behind him, a total absence of sound for a moment, and Roe knows he has said something dreadfully wrong. He straightens, afraid to look around, and feels Renee leave like the careful closing of a door somewhere.

 

*

One morning there is a letter waiting for Roe at the kitchen table. He doesn’t need to see the Philadelphia postmark, he knows somehow that the loose, uneven scrawl across the envelope is Heffron’s writing.

He holds it in his hands a while, smoothing the paper with the pad of his thumb. “Ain’t you going to open it?” his mother asks.

Roe can’t help himself. He looks out through the screen window to where Renee is waiting for him, under the oak tree. “Later, Maman,” he replies, putting the envelope back down on the table and crossing to the door.

That evening he finds his mother has propped it in on the dresser in his room, but it stays there, unopened, till the sun fades the ink letters to a pale watery whisper.

*

Sometimes they argue, and Roe will not allow himself to admit that he is a little afraid of Renee then. It’s not that he thinks she would ever harm him on purpose, but when she is angry there is something wild and animal about her now, a quality that he cannot fit with the person she was before she died. She frowns at him and the mirror in the next room will shatter. She spits out a bitter laugh and the door will slam. He tries to understand how the world must seem to her, but he won’t let himself think about words like _trapped_ and _lonely_ , tries not to dwell on how long she will be here or what will happen to her when, he hopes, many years from now, he himself will die. He supposes, when he can’t arrest his thoughts before they rush too far, that when he goes she will come with him.

One evening he walks into his room to find Renee standing, her back to him. He can tell by the tight lines of her neck that she is angry, but the air around her fairly crackles with her rage.

“What...what is it?” he asks, taking a tentative step towards her. 

“You still have it,” she says, turning. He sees the flash of blue in her hands - the other half of her headscarf. He’d pretended that its presence, folded carefully at the bottom of his bag all the way through the war, was a surprise to him. And when he’d returned home and found it still amongst his few possessions it was impossible to even think about getting rid of, so he’d kept it, at the bottom of a drawer of old books and papers.

“I didn’t...I don’t…”

“Why didn’t you tell me you still have it?”

“It’s not important.”

“Then why did you keep it?” Her fingers ghost across the little smudge of her blood, seeped across the edge seam.

“Why does it matter?” Roe asks, confused.

Renee throws the headscarf at him, her eyes snapping, “Because it does!”

He bends, picking up the fabric with obvious reverence.

“Am I not enough?” she asks.

“Of course you are.”

“I stay for you, I want to _leave_ but I stay for you,” she spits. 

“You want to leave,” Roe echoes. He nods once, and smiles a brittle smile. “Then leave.”

“I can’t,” she says, and then, as though it has just occurred to her, “Because of you. You’re keeping me here.”

“Don’t say that.” Roe shakes his head, feeling the anger quicken and stir deep in his belly. “You know that’s not true.”

“It is!” she screams. She wants to hurt him, he can see it in her eyes. “You’re keeping secrets! You won’t let me go! I’d leave if you’d let me!”

“Shut up!” he shouts, “Just, _shut up_!” 

Renee turns, and Roe is filled with panic, “No,” he says, “Wait, I’m sorry…”

“Gene?” comes his mother’s voice from the doorway, “You shouting at somebody?”

“Not now, Ma,” he bites out. 

“I hate you,” Renee whispers, and the rage in her voice is so vehement he feels it expand inside the room. His reaches out, and as his hand goes through the rounded line of her shoulder she disappears. 

The room is plunged into darkness, and it’s only later they find that all the bulbs in the house have blown. 

Renee is under the oak tree the next morning, smiling at him. Roe doesn’t know if he is forgiven, if the anger has blustered out of her, or if she has simply forgotten. He moves the headscarf the next time he is alone, just in case, and takes to carrying it around in his pocket. She never mentions it again.

*

He catches his mother staring out the kitchen window at the big oak tree near the road, and is washed with an icy cold jump of fear when he thinks that she can see Renee, waiting beneath it.

“What’s the matter, Maman?” he asks, tentatively.

His mother shakes herself and smiles, “Nothing Gene. Just that old tree. Must’a been there near a hundred years and now here it is, dying.”

There’s a catch of something like disappointment then, somewhere deep inside Roe. The fear of someone seeing Renee, taking her away somehow, is a powerful one. And yet, he realises for the first time that her presence is weighing him down too. It’s all just weighing him down.

“What do you mean?” he asks, vaguely.

“Go look at it,” his mother says, turning from the window. “All the leaves gone brown, sickly looking. Big storm and that thing’ll blow straight over, wouldn’t be surprised if it’s rotten clean through from the inside out.”

 

*

It’s okay when he’s with Renee, that’s the truth. Everything is okay. She is the only thing that will quell the rising panic when his thoughts stray too far along the path of remembering things like wounds and pain-stricken eyes and the smell of Landsberg, or when, quite suddenly, the warm Louisiana air turns the icy cold of the Ardennes and he shivers non-stop in the back room of the garage for twenty minutes, teeth chattering pathetically. 

Sometimes, especially in a crowd or surrounded by noise, in the static of the radio or a whistling of a kettle, he thinks he hears someone screaming for a medic. When Renee is there it only takes a few minutes, instead of ten, for the nausea, the tight knot of terror inside him, to ease its way out.

Consequently though, he find himself shunning the company of both friends and strangers more so than his naturally shy demeanour dictated before the war. The noise is too much for him, the movements too fast. 

When Renee is with him Roe thinks he must look like a wounded man injected with morphine: he can feel muscles he didn’t even know he was tensing relax, his breath becoming easy and light.

He knows she is an addiction. He's come that far at least, to a place that he can admit to it: she is dead and every day he spends with her he becomes a little less alive. But she is Renee. She is his, and he is hers. They met despite all the odds, two souls drawn together across the great expanse of a World War, and the fact that she is still here after her death is proof enough that this is the way things are supposed to be.

More letters appear on his dresser as the weeks pass, the same Philadelphia postmark, the same Heffron blue scrawl, and he’s not sure if it’s in his imagination but the writing seems distilled with a little more desperation each time. He picks each one up, smooths the paper, regards it like the chocolate Renee gave him in Bastogne. But just like then he cannot bring himself to open them. 

One day a letter arrives with a different handwriting on its envelope: the little printed letters are all in capitals, pressed heavily in black ink, a blustering stubborn quality to their slightly slanted angle. The postmark says Philadelphia, but this time he knows it's not from Babe.

Intrigued, Roe opens the letter, carefully. 

__

'Dear Doc,

I hope this letter finds you well and all is good down in Louisiana, South Philly is the same as ever and ain't that just the goddamned strangest thing what with all us boys being about as different as it's possible to be, some of us more than others. 

First I got to thank you for what you did for me and Joe back in them woods, you were a damn fine medic and there weren't nobody else me or Joe or any of the fellas would have wanted if we had the dumb luck to get hit, which of course we did.

Second off I got to ask what the hell you think you're doing, I know when I left you and Babe were buddies and we were all glad to see you got a buddy so you weren't always alone because the way we saw it no one could come through that fucking hell hole without at least one buddy to watch his back, but then it seems something happened though Babe don't got a clue what it is. He don't know that I wrote you and I feel stupid as hell doing it as it ain't my business but he's been having a tough time lately and I know-'

Roe folds the letter carefully without looking at, and places it back in its envelope. He doesn't need to finish reading it. He takes a deep breath, and reminds himself that he is not a medic anymore. Babe is not his responsibility. 

Thinking it, saying it feels like a strange sort of blasphemy. He sits down heavily on the bed and tries to calm his warring feelings, clanging around in his heart and upsetting his carefully constructed post-war life. 

"Coward," he whispers to himself. He knows it's true. He's home, neither a medic nor a paratrooper anymore, but it's still so hard and only gets easier when he is with Renee. He closes his eyes and imagines his insides - all the bits he's seen on dying soldiers and can identify now by sight and feel and smell- are frozen solid with Bastogne. He won't ever need to think about things like love or trust or hope again, because he's all ice fogged and solid inside, just like Renee. 

It makes him sad. It's not the way he wants to be. He wants to live and breathe and love like a real human being, but he's not sure he knows how, anymore. He just has to... _exist_ , for now, just keep going until he doesn't anymore, until he's gone and can be really and truly with her. And it's better this way: if he never reaches out he can never lose, and never be the one that's lost. He realises that he still cares for Babe, with an intensity that shocks him, and after everything he doesn't want to hurt him.

He can't help Babe. He can't even help himself.

Renee is all Roe has, all he needs. She expands inside his lungs. There's simply no room for anyone else

* 

Roe quits his job - or rather, he just stops turning up for work each day. He doesn’t mention it to Josef, or to his mother, and she doesn’t bring it up anymore. He’s glad not to have to walk past the Labranche house and the dogs anymore, see them skulk and whine and run from Renee.

Somedays it’s hard to even get out of bed in the morning, he just lies there heavy and too hot until Renee comes, her chilled hand smoothing the frowns from his forehead, and whispers him back from the precipice. He looks in the mirror to shave, when he remembers to at all, and doesn’t really recognise himself anymore. The hollows of his cheeks and eyes are a dark bruised colour, his lips just tinted with blue. The veins seem more visible, his skin paper-pale and fragile. He looks _cold_.

He doesn’t understand what’s happening to him, or when Renee became both the cause and the cure of whatever strange malady his scant medic training has no hope of diagnosing. But he can’t feel too worried, or scared, or much of anything any more.

“Are you happy?” she asks one night, as they sprawl cramped, side by side in Roe’s single bed.

 _I’m numb_ , he thinks.

“Sure,” Roe says.

“Your mother is sad. She cries when she thinks you can’t see.”

He’s not sure how to respond to that, just sits in the silence suddenly grown heavy with all the things he could never speak of with Renee. 

“I shouldn’t be here,” she says, and it’s something that she’s been saying more and more often lately. Roe feels a ripple of fear shoot through him, and draws a little closer to her. "You want to leave?” he asks, quietly.

“Do you want me to stay?”

“Yes,” Roe says, but there’s a split-second of hesitation that he can’t take back, and she nods. 

“And no,” she says. 

He takes her hand, feels her fingers cool and slender in his. “It’s not like that,” he protests.

“I know what it’s like,” Renee says, and it’s matter-of-fact, if a little sad, “I know better than you.” But she shakes her head, and tacks on a smile, “But it doesn’t matter, because I’m here.”

“If I knew how to help you I would,” Roe says, and he thinks this time, finally, he might mean it.

“Promise?” she asks, looking down at their laced fingers.

Roe takes a deep breath, pulls in the cold blue chill of her.

“Promise.”

* 

One morning Roe wakes late, hearing his mother bustling about somewhere. He sits up, letting the familiar faint nausea settle somewhere at the bottom of his gullet, and dresses with fingers that buzz and fumble.

He finds her out on the porch, setting down a suitcase and fixing her Sunday church hat to her hair with a pin. “Ma?” he asks, quietly.

His mother’s face is drained pale and twisted slightly with an emotion he can’t pin down, somewhere between fear and guilt and resolve. She says nothing, just points, out beyond the porch.

There are dead birds all over the ground around the house: small brown song-birds and fat black crows, a flash of a bluebird here and there, gulls and buzzards and sparrows, wings spread wide and ungainly.

The last few leaves on the dead oak tree drift free to scatter themselves amongst the feathered bodies. Roe’s mother picks up her suitcase and turns to him.

“Going to the church revival,” she says, drawing herself up like she’s going into battle but her eyes are filled with a terrible sadness. “Going to pray. Don’t know what’s going on Gene, but you’ve got to fix it.”

She leans in, and she’s so small now her head barely reaches his shoulder. “You got to fix it, boy.”

Roe spends all morning clearing the dead birds from the lawn, can’t think what to do with them so builds a fire out back and throws them on till his stomach heaves and turns with the smell of roasting meat that tries to drag him back to war and blood and battle.

Renee paces back and forth along the porch for the rest of the day, won’t speak to Roe at all. He sits on the old rocker his grandmere used to love under the shade of the porch and watches Renee’s restless movements. Sometime in the early evening she stops, and cocks her head, as though she can hear something very far away.

Roe blinks, and he is alone on the porch, the smell of smoke in his hair and shirt. He rubs absently at his hands, knows enough to sit, and wait.

When Edward Heffron stops beneath the dead oak tree, turns to look at him and lets the suitcase slip from his hands, Roe is not sure if the buzz inside of him is happiness or fear. He’s not even sure if he feels that surprised. He stands up, hears the rocker scritch and swing behind him.

"Your ma wrote me. Twice," Heffron says by way of greeting as he approaches Roe on the porch. "Said you weren't doin' so well.”

He stops, a yard or so from the porch steps, and really looks at Roe. “Jeez Doc, you look like crap."

"Yeah, speak for yourself," Roe answers with a small tight smile. Heffron is thinner than Roe remembers him, looks odd and childish in his too-big suit jacket. Roe’s never seen him out of uniform before. He looks young, pale beneath the light sunburn on the bridge of his nose, the back of his neck.

"Well. Must be the thing these days, interferin' in other people's business,” Roe continues, “Bill Guarnere wrote me about you, said the same thing."

"Son of a bitch," Heffron hisses, and then, sheepishly, "Sorry, Doc."

"I ain't a nun Heffron, swear as much as you goddamn like."

Heffron grins, and it's real, and wonderful. But it falters as he catches himself and remembers. 

“I wrote you, too,” he says.

Roe nods. “Got the letters. Didn’t read ‘em.”

“Oh.”

Heffron climbs the few steps to the porch and looks at him, awkwardly, the flush creeping crimson up to the tips of his ears. He turns and leans on the railing.

"Okay," Heffron nods, to himself, "Okay I'm just gonna say it, so just...shut up and let me say it." He has the look that Roe has seen many times before, of a man about to double-time Currahee just to spite Sobel, or dash out across open ground to draw a sniper's fire: stubborn, scared, a little angry. 

"You were real good to me in Bastogne, you know, what with Julian and, well, _Bastogne_. But then you just went...wherever it is you go. Away." Heffron waves a shaky hand vaguely in the air, before scrubbing it through his hair, sending it standing straight up in all directions. "And you're doin' it again. So....don't," he finishes, rather weakly. 

"You done?" Roe asks, a little harshly, perhaps. "I did what I had to do."

"Yeah," Heffron agrees, "But we're home now, you don't have to do it no more."

Roe smiles, and it tastes bitter. "Don't you get it Heffron? We won't ever be home. That's the price we paid."

"For what?"

"Bein’ the ones who lived."

"Jesus Christ Doc!", Heffron shakes his head, and Roe can see he's blinking heavily against the tears, and suddenly he can’t look at him. "Don't fucking say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you wish you hadn't!"

They're silent for a while, staring out at the evening sky beginning to darken to a bruised purple, the stars easing themselves out, one by one. Roe stills the tumult of unidentifiable emotions charging through him, and Heffron seems to be concentrating on calming himself too. 

"I know it's tough, Doc. And maybe you're right, 'cause everything has changed - or maybe it hasn't but _we_ have - and home don't feel like home no more. But we got to help each other, like we did back then. Or else...or else we’re screwed."

Roe bites out a bitter laugh. “Heffron, if you knew what’s best you’d turn right round and head back to Philly. I’m already screwed.” He blushes crimson at the strangled tone of his words, the naked desperation there. 

“No, Doc…”

“What if I told you I’m goin nuts? That I’m seein’ ghosts.”

“Ghosts…” Heffron repeats, after a while.

“Just the one,” Roe says, shuffling for a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, the lighter shaking visibly in his hand. He offers the pack to Heffron.

“Who?” Heffron says, taking a cigarette and accepting Roe’s lighter. His tone is utterly calm, careful, and Roe recognises it as the one he himself had used on panicked, wounded men.

Roe takes a breath, feels as though he’s fighting for air. “A girl I met, in Bastogne - a nurse,” he says. “She died there, but she been with me ever since.”

Heffron blows blue smoke out into the night air and nods, like they’re discussing the weather, or baseball. “Doc, I think we all...we all feel like that. Sometimes I think Julian -”

“No Heffron,” Roe interrupts, “I don’t mean it like that. I mean…. I mean,” he falters “….she’s standin’ right there.”

The other man turns to look, and Roe feels a rush of gratitude for that, at least. For Heffron the blank space of night air is completely empty, but he nods once, decisively. “Okay.”

“You believe me?” Roe asks, utterly shocked, because Heffron says it like he means it, like he’d trust anything Roe told him. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Doc, it _sounds_ fucking crazy. But...not you,” Heffron says, “If it were anyone else….but not you.”

Renee smiles at him, and Roe can’t help but echo it, just slightly. “It’s him, isn’t it?” she asks, “Babe?”

Heffron gives a start, like he’s just touched a live wire, the colour draining from his face.

“What?” Roe asks, looking back and forth between them. “You heard that?” Roe asks, breathless.

“No...I...don’t know,” Heffron swallows a heaving breath, “Did she, uh, did she say my name?”

Roe nods.

“Fuck, Doc,” Heffron spits, looking genuinely scared now, “This is real, isn’t it?”

“Think so,” Roe says.

Heffron is beginning to look like he might throw up, so Roe gives him a moment, and turns to Renee.  
“But she has to go,” he says, looking at her, and he is proud of himself for sounding like he means it.

Renee nods, and smiles sadly. “I do.”

The silence stretches out for a moment, and Roe tries to remind his lungs to breathe, his heart to beat, all the bits small and vital to _just keep going_.

“Don’t know how to do this,” he says to her, looking at his feet.

She quirks her head to the side, eyes slitted, as though listening to something. 

“In your pocket,” she says, simply.

Roe hadn’t even realised his hand was there, withdraws it, and the scrap of blue fabric.

Renee flickers, for just a second.

“Doc…?” Heffron says, and Roe turns to see him inhaling quickly, as though to steady himself. He reaches into his pocket and takes out the other half of Renee’s headscarf.

"You kept it too," Roe says, wondering. "Why?"

"I...don’t know," Babe says, the flush creeping crimson up to the tips of his ears. "I guess I was..ah..," he casts about, awkwardly. "I was having a tough time...and then you came to my foxhole and everything kind of seemed like it could...get better again, some day. You know?"

"So you kept it."

"I know it's dumb,” Heffron says, awkwardly rubbing the back of his sunburnt neck, “Kind of like a lucky charm I guess."

Heffron smooths his thumb over the blue fabric, and nods one, decisively, handing it to Roe.

The two pieces of fabric feel real in Roe’s hands, realer than anything has in months. 

He remembers, with sickening clarity, that night in Bastogne: the way the flame licked amongst the rubble, the chaos and the deafening noise, and Renee, like a note of silence amongst it all. He sees her there, broken and bloodied, and the biles rises in his throat just like it did then because that’s not her, it can’t be. He forces himself to really look, like he never did that night. Really look, because that is her, because she is dead, and gone.

The pain is like a deft knife sliding between his ribs, quick and cruel, utterly wonderful. 

It hurts, makes him gasp and almost stagger, but it’s something, Jesus Christ, it’s _something_.

There’s a rush of panic that spreads from his gut like warm water, tickling up his spine, but when he looks at Renee and sees her smile it all falls away.

He feels like a man about to jump out of a plane for the first time.

The fire he’d built up behind the house is still burning, little glowing orange embers that pop and startle every now and then. The dead birds are all burnt to ash now, and he’s grateful for that at least.

Heffron is to his side, and Renee, on the other.

“You sure?” he says, though he knows the answer.

Renee nods, once, and seems to grow a little more solid in the flickering light. Heffron makes a strangled noise beside him.

“I..I think I see her, Doc,” he says, a little breathless, and then “She’s pretty.”

Renee smoothes her blood-matted hair, a small echo of vanity. “Tell him I’ve looked better,” she says with a quirk of her lips, but Roe doesn’t need to because Heffron hears, somehow, and laughs a little in reply.

Roe tries to laugh, but it hiccups into a pained sound he can’t quite hold back. “Wish you didn’t have to go,” he says, looking at his feet, because he feel the tears prickling in his eyes now and that’s not fair, not fair on Renee.

“Me too,” she says, and he knows she means it. 

In another life. If only. Wishes and could-have-beens.

“Guess this is goodbye then.”

“Yes.”

Heffron makes a move to step away, but Renee and Roe both speak as one, “Stay.”

The fabric, cool and smooth in his hands. He turns it over once, ghosts a thumb along the little smudge of Renee’s blood, the small blur of Heffron’s on his piece. Roe can tell it’s been cleaned and cared for, but the mark is still there. And that’s right, he supposes. Heffron always was a part of this, even when he wasn’t.

Roe drops the headscarf onto the fire, watches for a second as the pieces smoke and blacken, and turns to Renee. The change in her is enough to jolt his heart, for a moment. He wonders how he could ever have thought the echo he brought home with him was really her. For one bright moment she stands, hair shining in the firelight, the glistening blood fading away to nothing. 

“Breathe, Eugene,” Renee says, “Just breathe.” She smiles, and she’s real, and it breaks his heart.

Her hand in his is almost warm, almost alive for a moment. And then she is light, fading like dying coals. And then she is gone.

*

Roe can feel Babe following him quietly, at a distance as he moves from room to room. He knows he probably looks half crazy but isn’t quite able to marshall himself into the cool stillness that used to come so easily to him. He must make sure that she can really be gone for good now, he can’t be too careful. He wants her back - oh, he wants her back so much he can barely breathe around the hole inside of him - but this is what’s best for the both of them. 

He repeats that in his head, over and over like a chant, and ties his breathing to it so that he can be sure that he won’t just stop from loss and grief. One room after the other, Roe stops the clocks, pulls the blinds, covers the mirrors with the black cloth his mother kept folded neatly in the blanket chest at the bottom of her bed. The fabric is smooth and cool and dead as Renee’s headscarf, and looks exactly the same as when he last saw it, the day his father died.

Then he sits: just folds in on himself and sits on the kitchen floor and stares and stares till his eyes are dry and prickled. Babe sits crossed-legged opposite him, takes out a pack of cigarettes, and they smoke in silence. When that packet is done Heffron leans forward and takes the pack from Roe’s shirt pocket, and they smoke that too. At some point he gets up to make coffee, presses a cup of it to Roe’s hand, urges him gently to drink.

But he doesn’t press Roe, doesn’t try to get him to talk, or god forbid ask him how he is. He just lets him be, and Roe feels like his chest will burst right open with gratitude.

"I'm sorry..." Roe says, after a while, when he’s found his voice once more. His words come out scratchy and raw. "Guess I didn't know how to not be alone."

“Well,” Heffron says, easing out his legs. “That’s good,” he nods, at Roe’s quick frown, “‘Cause I didn’t know how _to_ be alone. After everything. Home. Just me. So. Guess we got to help each other, right?”

“What if I can’t?” Roe says, and he hadn’t meant to, he really hadn’t. He swallows around the tight dryness in his throat. “What if I can’t help you now, Babe? I ain’t your medic anymore.”

“You know, God love you Gene, you can be real dumb sometimes,” Heffron says, utterly serious. “You don’t need to _do_ anything.” He doesn’t elaborate, just blows out a stream of smoke and looks at the morning light beginning to unfurl through the kitchen window.

“Gonna be tough, huh?” Roe says.

“Yep,” Babe agrees, “Good thing we’re a couple of tough sons of bitches.”

Roe looks at Heffron sitting opposite him -in a shirt two sizes too big, sunburnt nose peeling a little - and smiles, and feels himself begin to thaw.

*  
End

**Author's Note:**

> This was a real labour of love for me - I spent almost a year on it, really wanting to get it to somewhere good. I've written a whole hell of a lot of fic about Roe and all the angst and trauma that comes with him and his friendship with Babe, but this is the closest I think I've come to hitting something real - at least, that's how I feel. I hope people won't be put off with Renee featuring so much in the fic - it's essentially a story about Roe, about his detaching from everything real as a means of coping, and an ultimate glimmer of hope in the form of Babe Heffron.


End file.
